There was nothing colonialist about Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon is apparently planning to “decolonize” its commemorations of William Shakespeare in his home town. This follows a trend in which “the Globe Theatre in London ran a series of seminars titled Anti-Racist Shakespeare which promoted scholarship focused on the idea of race in his plays.” We are told that Shakespeare should take the fall for colonial attitudes:

This idea of Shakespeare’s universal genius “benefits the ideology of white European supremacy”, it was claimed. This is because it presents European culture as the world standard for high art, a standard which was pushed through “colonial inculcation” and the use of Shakespeare as a symbol of “British cultural superiority” and “Anglo-cultural supremacy”. Veneration of Shakespeare is therefore part of a “white Anglo-centric, Eurocentric, and increasingly ‘West-centric’ worldviews that continue to do harm in the world today”. The project recommended that Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust recognise that “the narrative of Shakespeare’s greatness has caused harm — through the epistemic violence”.

The cure is to make Stratford-upon-Avon less about the man who is the only reason anyone on the planet has heard of Stratford-upon-Avon or would ever go there as a tourist:

The project also recommended that the trust present Shakespeare not as the “greatest”, but as “part of a community of equal and different writers and artists from around the world”. The trust then secured funding from the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, an organisation that finances projects that boost diversity and inclusion, to help make the collection more international in its perspective. As part of its commitment to being more international in outlook, the trust has so far organised events celebrating Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali poet, and a Romeo and Juliet-inspired Bollywood dance workshop. . . . It will also explore how objects could be used as the focus for new interpretations which tell more international stories, in order to appeal to a more diverse audience.

The involvement of a grant-making foundation gives some clue to what is actually afoot here.

Now, leave aside the general insanity and asymmetry of the whole woke worldview and its various hydra-headed ideologies of “decolonization,” Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), critical race theory (CRT), and the rest. Leave aside also the fundamental betrayal of an organization — literally, a trust — that is turning against the very person and cause to which it owes its entire existence and purpose. Let’s just focus on the idea that it is necessary to “decolonize” William Shakespeare. I start with one very important question:

Are you people idiots?

Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616. It is believed that most of his most famous plays were written and first performed roughly in the period between 1595 and 1606. Look at a map of the British Empire in 1606. It’s not a very big map. England ruled virtually nothing outside of its own islands. Indeed, we say England because what is now the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was not even founded until the union of England and Scotland in 1707, nearly a century after Shakespeare’s death. England was still in the midst of taking full control of Ireland. I’m pretty sure the “decolonizers” aren’t trying to add the perspectives of the Scots or the Irish.

England did not then rule any of India, which was under the control of the Mughal Empire, rulers of a fifth of the world’s people. Only in 1604 did England escape a draining war against the massive Spanish Empire, which had launched the Armada to conquer England in 1588, when Shakespeare was 24. The Battle of Lepanto, when the forces of Europe began to break the Ottoman Empire’s control of the Mediterranean, was fought during his lifetime; the siege of Vienna, which finally turned back the threat of Muslim conquest of the European heartland, was fought 67 years after his death. The East India Company was founded only in 1600, one of a series of joint stock companies that aimed to expand English overseas trade; the first of these to be royally chartered, in 1555, was The Mysterie and Companie of the Merchant Adventurers for the Discoverie of Regions, Dominions, Islands and Places Unknown, commonly known as the Muscovy Company, which sought to open Russia to trade. The first permanent English colony in the Western Hemisphere, at Jamestown, Va., was settled in 1607. The first slaves were not introduced there until 1619, three years after Shakespeare died, and racial chattel slavery did not become institutionalized until the 1660s. Up until the 1640s, there were more European slaves arriving in North Africa than African slaves arriving in the Americas, and far more British slaves held in Africa than African slaves held in British colonies. The Royal African Company, which was granted a monopoly on the transatlantic slave trade, was not founded until 1660.

Stratford does have a colonial history: The earliest archeological evidence suggests that it may have been first settled during the Roman Empire, when Britannia was a distant province ruled by one of the world’s two great empires (the other one, in China, is still there). It was variously overrun by Vikings and Normans. But as a landlocked town in Warwickshire in the center of England, it has no outward-looking history of its own in the manner of, say, London, Liverpool, Bristol, Dover, Plymouth, or Portsmouth.

Of course, like any writer, Shakespeare was a man of his time and place, with some of the prejudices and worldview that implied. But moreso than any other writer of drama or literature in the English language or maybe any other, he also changed how people thought, and transcended his own time. Sure, Othello (written around 1604) reflects some racial prejudices, but how many other works of literature endure from the early 17th century with a black main character? Sure, Merchant of Venice traffics in antisemitic tropes, but they are the tropes of the medieval world, not of “colonialism.” For that matter, the Moors reflected not European conquest of Africa but North African conquest of Spain. Shakespeare’s writings were unusually cosmopolitan: he wrote of antiquity and what was then modernity, of Romans and Greeks and Trojans and Danes and Moors and Venetians and Florentines and Scots and Egyptians and even Frenchmen. The Tempest, one of Shakespeare’s last major dramatic works (written around 1610), shows the dawning of the Americas on his thinking. Yet, one rarely encounters faceless hordes of savages; his gift was to give all of his characters depth and humanity and psychological complexity and, of course, Shakespearean eloquence. I’m not so sure that putting on “a Romeo and Juliet-inspired Bollywood dance workshop” exactly helps the cause of disproving that Shakespeare’s appeal is universal.

There was nothing colonialist about Shakespeare. He comes to us as, if anything, the last representative of pre-colonial England, closer in time and outlook to the High Middle Ages than to our own day. He didn’t read English novels because (unless one counts the Canterbury Tales) none had been written yet. He did not advance the voice of a hegemonic culture; he gave a voice to an island that had thus far made little enough cultural mark in the arts upon the capitals of the continent. The oft-quoted words he gave to Richard II testify to that sense of England as a fortress against an encroaching world:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

That is the pride of its own place in the world that the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust wants to take from Stratford-upon-Avon.